Three years ago we launched Google Partners to help businesses connect with online professionals and agencies. Top Partners began earning their Google Partner badge by demonstrating their business was healthy, their clients were happy, and they were up to date with the latest product knowledge.

Since then, we received a number of requests from our Partners asking for a way to further differentiate themselves. Today, we’re excited to share the addition of Google Partner specializations.

The new feature is embedded into the Google Partner badge and designed to help businesses identify the right Partner for their specific business needs.

Partners can earn specializations in 5 areas of expertise:

Search

Mobile

Video

Display

Shopping

To earn a specialization, badged Partners will need at least one certified individual and a history of consistent product performance.

“The changes to the Google Partner program are exciting for potential advertisers and our company,” says Neal Gann, CEO of Showroom Logic. “These new specializations show Google’s commitment to better serve their Partners and help us highlight what makes our technology and team so unique. It should also help prospective clients make a clear choice because it's now easier for them to find top Partners that are aligned with their immediate goals.”

The new badge is designed to recognize Partners who manage a substantial portfolio of Google advertising campaigns and deliver great results for their customers. Premier Partners will be required to maintain additional certification requirements and will receive increased support from Google.

"Google identifying and recognizing highly experienced agencies is a great step and a distinctive honor. We are thrilled to be a part of the new designation and look forward to displaying this badge," shares Joe Chura, CEO of Launch Digital Marketing.

We hope these updates will help businesses find the right Partner for their needs and allow our Partners to better differentiate themselves. Learn more at the new Google Partners homepage.

As marketers kick off 2017 planning, consumer preference for online video is higher than ever. Today’s study from comScore, commissioned by Google, shows that adults are 30% more likely to prefer online video platforms over TV when given a choice where to watch video content. Does your media plan reflect that kind of preference?

If online video is your audience’s priority, it should be your media plan’s priority, too. We dug into the recent study and came up with six things to keep in mind about this changing audience as you develop your 2017 plan:

1. They Prefer Online Video Platforms to TV

The popularity of online video continues to grow. Today, when given a choice where to watch video, adults prefer online video platforms 30% more than watching on TV. Among millennials, that number jumps to 105%.

2. People Watching Long & Short-Form Video Prefer YouTube

Among viewers that watch both long and short-form content, 81% cite a preference for YouTube, making it the #1 choice. Compare that to the next-highest choice, TV, which earned just 56% of viewer votes.

3. They Choose YouTube Over Other Online Video Providers

YouTube also wins when compared to other online video providers. When asked to pick one online video platform, 48% of adults chose YouTube (vs. 29% for Netflix and 10% for Facebook):

4. Viewers Take Action on Video Ads, Especially on Short-Form Content

Online video has forever changed the media landscape, with more than half of all people regularly watching short-form videos (like branded content or viral videos), and two-thirds of millennials watching short-form weekly.

That’s good news for brands: comScore’s research shows viewers are more likely to take action after watching ads on short-form content compared to traditional content (like movies and tv shows). Taking action could include sharing on social media, looking for more information about the brand advertised, recommending the brand or product, etc.

5. They Prefer YouTube for Branded Content and Videos Uploaded by Users.

We already heard that adults who watch short and long-form content prefer YouTube, but it’s also preferred across multiple content types. For example, 74% of adults prefer YouTube for videos uploaded by users and—critically—69% prefer YouTube for videos uploaded by brands, companies, and institutions.

6. YouTube Super-users May Surprise You

The final part of comScore’s research examined YouTube’s most passionate fans—“die hards”—and they aren’t who you might expect. Many are parents, live in a city, and 49% are women:

We’re announcing the launch of the YouTube Brand Partner Program Certification (youtube.com/certified) live from two of the year’s biggest advertising industry events -- The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France and VidCon in Anaheim, California.

Three years ago, we created theYouTube Brand Partner Program to provide inspiration, education, and support for marketers looking to build content strategies for YouTube. Since then, we’ve welcomed leading brands from all over the world around the globe into the initiative and watched their creative teams adapt our frameworks into innovative campaigns.

As watch time on YouTube continues to grow year over year, advertisers are taking note of trends and embracing originality when it comes to their content. The old saying about content being king continues to ring true whether you’re posting game reviews, comedy sketches, political discourse, or, you guessed it, promoting brands. The stats back it up, too. New research released by Pixability today shows the top 100 brands garnered 50 percent more views this year than last.

Now, we want to continue empowering the agency community to lead the charge by providing easy-to-follow lessons so anyone can construct impressive content campaigns no matter how experienced.

The YouTube Brand Partner Program Certification is an online curriculum designed to equip agencies with the knowledge and tools they need to design effective video content strategies. From publishing frameworks, to how to best partner with YouTube creators, to campaign optimization, the certification provides a guided learning path that will help agencies create successful YouTube content and distribution strategies for their clients. It will be available online for agencies across the globe in 22 languages.

Among the first agencies to sign up for the program as an early adopter was MEC’s Wavemaker who also made a commitment to certify all employees globally in the coming months.

“The launch of the YouTube Brand Partner Program Certification is incredibly timely and exciting for MEC," Global COO Alastair Aird said, "With MEC Wavemaker we have a different kind of content offer, one that helps our clients see exactly what role content and platforms play in their customers’ lives and how that will directly impact their brand’s performance.

It’s different because we have the data to identify precisely what consumer behaviour needs to change along the purchase journey and create content that’s specifically designed to make that change happen. Equipping our people with the necessary knowledge to design the most effective video content is key to our service to clients.”

Marketing is evolving. Agencies are leading that change. And YouTube is here to help. If your agency would like to request an invitation to the program, please reach out to your representative or submit your informationhere.

With more than a billion viewers each month, YouTube is the place the world chooses to watch. As a platform dedicated to sight, sound and motion, great video ads work well here. Whether they’re 30 second spots built for TV, 4 minute short films, or 6 second bumper ads, we work to make every video ad have the greatest Watchtime, Audibility, Viewability and Engagement (WAVE), to help ensure you get the full impact of your work.

As thousands of creatives gather at Cannes Lions this week, many are thinking about what makes great video ad creative. Great storytelling in the digital age is both art and science. While we prefer to leave the art up to you, our science has shown that the ads that tend to work best on YouTube are the ones that tend to work best for today’s viewing experience. Whether you are building for our TrueView in-stream ads, which let viewers skip after 5 seconds, or for TV, today’s viewers are impatient. They have a trigger finger on their phone, tablet or remote. So you better catch their attention right from the start.

In multiple research studies we did last year, which analyzed hundreds of TrueView campaigns, we saw four key elements emerge:

Brand placement matters: Ads that showed the brandvisually in the first 5 seconds had higher ad recall and brand awareness lift.

No sound? Less impact: We tested 280 campaigns and found that among users exposed to ads with both sight and sound, ad recall had a lift of 43%. Among users exposed to video ads that had no sound, ad recall was significantly lower at 31%.1

Calls to actiondrive impact: We saw higher brand awareness lift among ads with clear calls to action, such as an invitation to visit a YouTube channel or brand website.

Time counts: We found that there is a consistent relationship between how long an ad is viewable and increase in brand awareness and consideration. The longer a user views your ad, the higher the lift in these two metrics.

All of these factors help ensure engagement. On average, we’ve seen that viewers who completed TrueView ads are 23x more likely to visit or subscribe to a brand channel, watch more by that brand, or share the brand video than those not exposed to the ad.And you can amp up Brand Lift results by targeting great video ads on top channels through Google Preferred. When you combine these, you can ‘ride the WAVE to success.’